The weapon you linked to is an anti ballistic missile. The difficulty is not purely in how fast the target is going, but how much it maneuvers, the duration at which it can sustain those speeds, and the altitudes at which it operates. The article addresses this early on.
Totally agree. Cool little project, but I cannot think of one use case where this is needed.
> But "fine" starts to feel slow when you need dense time resolution. Generating a month of ephemeris data at one-second intervals is 2.6 million propagations per satellite.
Ok, except SGP4 loses its accuracy over WAY shorter time frames than a month (think hours/days)
> Pass prediction over a ground station network might need sub-second precision across weeks.
a) sub-second ephemeris for antenna pointing is crazy overkill, and b) same comment about accuracy as above.
It will require a number of innovations just to solve the formation flying aspect of the system, not to mention the other challenges (listed and not)... good luck with that.
There are a couple interesting-sounding claims made here but there is basically no detail to be found, which strikes me as odd at best and suspicious at worst.
It adds to a pretty large body of literature around this subject, the gist of which is "risk is going up, but we don't really have a good way of estimating what that means in terms of actual collision rates".
This has been an indispensable resource in my career, to the point that I will frequently search for "<topic of interest> gunter", knowing that he'll have the best collection of information available openly.